Gorillas in the Mist (11 page)

“You really must consider the traditions of the local people,” Alyette advised. “They depend, you know, on what they can get from the land. You must be fair to them.”

Dian was unmoved.

“The Batwa are poachers pure and simple,” she insisted. “They set their snares everywhere for the antelope and hyrax, and that’s bad enough, God knows, but they often end up catching gorillas too. I know, I know, the adults can break free, but they can be maimed for life by the wire nooses. And we both know some poachers deliberately kill gorillas and make souvenir ashtrays out of their dried hands to sell to the horrid tourist trade, and sell skulls and heads to the so called sportsmen who want African trophies for their rec rooms. Poachers catch baby gorillas for sale to zoos, too. There
has
to be strict enforcement of the park laws or there won’t be any gorillas left, and very little else either.”

Nor did Rosamond Carr’s protests on behalf of the Tutsi cattle herders make much impression on Dian’s resolve.

“The herders ruin the habitat, Rosamond, because they have far too many cattle. They keep ten times what they need, just for prestige. There are so many up here now—they churn the ground until it looks as if it were plowed. They crush the plants the gorillas eat, shut them out of the best feeding areas, and
force them higher and higher up the slopes into the cold and wet until they get pneumonia. Those high altitudes are deadly for them. Let the Tutsi cut down their herds to only what they need and graze them outside the park.”

Her disagreements with Alyette and Rosamond forced Dian to realize that very few people placed the same paramount priority on the survival of the gorillas that she did. But she remained inflexible.

I came onto an empty poacher’s camp today. There was one flea-bitten, rack-ribbed dog guarding a lean-to fitted into a huge hagenia tree. The only other signs of life were fresh footprints that led up and down the trail. A newly killed duiker was lying on top of the roof of the lean-to. I offered the duiker to the tracker as bait to help me destroy the sixty bamboo sticks that the poachers had just brought up from below to use for setting snares. He went about the task willingly, helping me to break the heavier pieces. Once we had broken all the potential traps, I turned my attention to the inside of the lean-to and found a big bag of millet, which I threw to the four winds, a couple of hundred yards of rope especially woven for snare traps, and several
chungas
or big iron pots for cooking. Although I am not a thief at heart, I do believe in making things difficult for poachers, so I tied the
chungas
onto my African along with the snare rope and the duiker, and we left the camp apparently undetected except for the dog, who’d been regarding our doings with a malevolent eye from the nearby foliage. For all I know, the poachers were lined up beside him, glaring, but that doesn’t matter. At least I left the tattered red rags that one of them had left out to dry in the late afternoon sun—I’ve not been reduced to stealing a man’s clothing!

The point of this story comes from the fact that I was accompanied by my friend Alyette de Munck, who has known Africa since birth. Because of this continent she
has lost her son and nephew, and yet nothing can discourage her love of the land—and love is a trite word to describe such an affinity. So because of this poacher’s camp, a harmless afternoon’s stroll, which had previously been filled with the beauty of an isolated river flowing deep within the jungle fastness of wild orchids and liana and senna, turned into a heated argument between the two of us.

As I stood there breaking bamboo snares one by one, she stood apart and in a very firm way asked what right I had, an American here in Africa for only a few months, to invade the rights of the Africans whose country this was. I kept on breaking traps, though I couldn’t help but agree with her-Africa belongs to Africans.

My friend continued to plead her case.

“These men have a right to hunt. It’s their country! You have no right to destroy their efforts.”

Maybe she is right, for the country African living on the fringes of a park area has little alternative but to turn to poaching for his livelihood. But at the same time, why should one condone a man if he openly breaks the law-why shouldn’t you take whatever action you can against him. The man who kills the animals today is the man who kills the people who get in his way tomorrow. He recognizes the fact that there is a law saying he mustn’t do this or that, but without the enforcement of this law he is free to do as he chooses. If I can enforce the written rules of a supposedly protected park against the slaughter of animals, then I must do it. And so I continued to break bamboo, the reliable and flexible trap of the last game in Africa.

In a manner as unpredictable as their relationship had always been, Dian and Alexie maintained contact by mail—she in desultory fashion, while he wrote increasingly often and with supreme confidence that she would follow where he chose to lead.

Alexie’s recent letters are mainly about leaving Notre
Dame and transferring to the Chicago School of Divinity to major in comparative religion for his Ph.D. I am now expected to hurry back to the States and live with him in Chicago in a blissfully married state until he gets his degree, then his field work will take us to South America or northern Africa, where we will be happy ever after. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find my rose-colored glasses anymore, though he still seems to have his.

Seeking allies, Alexie kept in touch with the Prices, and the news of Dian’s and the de Muncks’ chilling experiences in the Congo spurred the three of them into action.

In the last days of September Alexie met the Prices in New York. An engagement ring was purchased, a flight booked, and Alexie dispatched on a rescue mission to bring Dian back to civilization. He boarded his plane confident that when offered the take-it-or-leave-it choice between marriage and continuing her studies, she would choose marriage.

When he came face to face with her in her mountain camp, he was horrified. Dressed in torn jeans and faded windbreaker, her long hair matted with the rain, her eyes bemused, she seemed like some barbaric creature of the jungle.

Alexie delivered his ultimatum—me or the gorillas—and was stunned when Dian turned him down. He persisted.

“Marry me,” he pleaded, “and I’ll give up university. We’ll go to Rhodesia and take up farming. I don’t want us ever to be separated again.”

Dian would not be moved. “Not possible, darling. You’d be giving up too much. We’ve both got a lot of things to do.”

“Then we can do them together. If you
must
stay here, how would it be if I stayed on too …
for a year
… on condition that you’d leave this place then?”

“Alexie, it wouldn’t work. Go back and get your Ph.D. Do what you have to do and I’ll do what I have to do. Perhaps in two years’ time, well, we’ll see how things look then.”

He left the camp heartbroken—and humiliated. At Kisoro
he wrote a farewell letter to Dian and left it in the care of Walter Baumgartel. He wrote, telling Dian to keep the ring or throw it into the stream near camp if she chose. His last words to her were, “You saw me cry, and that, my dear, was the last tear I will ever shed for you.”

Although relieved that the affair was at an end, Dian was defensive too.

He came up here like Sir Galahad, but who asked him to rescue me? He criticized everything here; said that the Rwandans hated me, that they called me a wild woman and wanted me out. Said I was making life impossible for my mother. He as good as forced me to throw him out.

She told Leakey something of what had happened, and he replied, “I am delighted at the news that you have found a good place on Karisimbi, with plenty of gorillas, and I do hope that now things will become reasonable once more. In particular I hope that the young man who you say that you are having to be rude to realized that you don’t want him in your life. You’ve got such important things to do.”

During the succeeding weeks, Dian found two more gorilla families, which meant that she was virtually assured of being able to locate at least one group to observe on any given day. Her total hours of gorilla observations were mounting swiftly.

Other aspects of her life were also going well.

She was making headway on an article for
National Geographic
. Three publishers had written to her expressing interest in a book to be based on her experiences with the gorillas. She heard from Cambridge University in England that she had been accepted for Ph.D. studies on the basis of her preliminary field notes, and she began preparing to attend her first semester there in the autumn of 1968. Meanwhile, she was reveling in the Virungas.

I’ve been doing a great deal of survey work in the areas around the volcanoes. Because of this I’ve seen the most fantastically gorgeous country I never dreamed existed. Yesterday I found a river that tumbles down from Mt.
Karisimbi to the Congo by a series of spectacular waterfalls…. I really felt as though I was the first white person ever to see it and gave up all thoughts of looking for gorilla for that day.

Despite the physical hardships and the loneliness, Dian was now finding her solitary life a deeply satisfying experience. She observed herself in a series of highly evocative, somewhat transcendental musings.

I must say, despite the leaks, my canvas tent is a happy roof. It beams with the morning sunshine when the day is bright, and it frowns a little darker whenever I open my eyes to the prospect of a drippy dawn. I’m lucky in having a tea-boy who, no matter how much I cuss him out for bringing tea at six, brings tea at six. He pecks once at the tent pole with the teapot lid and then runs like hell. Six o’clock is not such an unholy hour, in fact it is the normal hour of awakening in most countries, but I guess I’m getting to be an old lady-six seems very early to me.

When the moon is full here it seems a sacrilege to be inside one’s tent, for outside are screaming the violet, iridescent demands of snow-peaked volcanoes and etchings of lacy mosses and leaves against the silver-blue sky. Each tree assumes its own character when silhouetted against the moonlit sky-some are sinister, some are comical, but none is just a plain tree and none belongs to the daylight world. Walt Disney would be pleased to know Mr. Pluto-a gangly hypericum tree whose moss-tipped limbs exactly resemble Pluto, even to the whiskers. But even Mr. Pluto is just another tree in the daylight world.

To leave the kerosene lamps of the tent and to go outside on such a night is to be automatically captured in spite of one’s best intentions. Inevitably the nipple of Karisimbi is shining with snow, and the sparkle of that triangle can only be matched by the tusks of The Loner elephant wading through the creek just outside the tent. When I go out on
such a night, he raises his tusks and trumpets as if to say the night belongs to him and I am the intruder. When this happens I relinquish the silhouettes of the trees, the silver phosphorescence of Karisimbi and the golden glow of my campfire, for it is true, the night belongs to the animals and I am an intruder. At the same time, I wonder why it is that the elephant and buffalo will crowd around the area of my camp on such a night. Is it because they feel safer, or does the spectacle of the moon here make them as oblivious to any potential dangers as it does me?

On such nights I feel that it is mandatory to track The Loner as he scratches himself and feeds his way along the meadow. My voice seems to fall on his ears like so much empty air, and he pays no attention to me or my shadow in spite of the fact that I’m near enough to reach out and touch him. The buffalo, however, are not quite as moon-touched: your presence is signaled by snorts and bellows before you pick up their elongated yellow eyes around the edges of the meadow.

And why is it on such nights that Visoke always chooses to hide her mediocre appearance in veils of cloud while Karisimbi and Mikeno trumpet the moon and insist upon showing off their splendid peaks to full advantage under the silver reflection of the full moon? Also, why is it that the owls and hyrax refuse to add to the litany of the night when the air is silver and bright? They refrain on these magical nights, thus giving sound only to the tumble of the creek, the snorts of the buffalo, and the trumpet of the elephant. They save their presence for the dark nights, as if they know they would only be superfluous on the nights of the full moon.

There is an opening in the trees of my meadow that lets me see the heavy, ordinary rain clouds blanketing the lowlands on my magical moonlit nights up here. I’m sorry for those below me who cannot feel the moon the way it
shines up here, even though they know the daily sun as I can never know it.

Why should most African novels begin with, “It was a hot night, there was a full moon, the hyena was calling, the mosquitoes were swarming,” etc.? Why should I apologize for saying it’s always cold here. Actually I’m lucky ever to see the moon, and as for a bug-bless his soul, he’s a brave one, he is, if he comes up to Karisoke. Wouldn’t it introduce it better if I say I’m a noncommercial nobody-I have a clean tent and take a hot bath each night, but I’m not on a Kenyan safari; I see more really infested sores and goddamned chronic cases of leprosy than Schweitzer, but I’m certainly no missionary….

Yesterday I spent the usual day-six hours of climbing in and out of ravines on seventy percent slopes, and I screamed like a baptized baby over the worst of them for I know one fear, and that is acrophobia. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work. I’m beginning to think so just because of my inability to control this particular line of thinking-fear of heights.

People have many fears, some deserved, some pretense, some either heard or read about, and some that seem to need cherishing because they elicit sympathy and thus bring attention. I can’t recall that my acrophobia can be attributed to any of these attention-getting aims, but it is real nonetheless. It is the only thing I feel brave about in spite of all the accolades for working in the Congo or here with the gorillas. The only peril I really face in this work is sliding across a moss-slippery rock face of seventy percent of slope, something a two-year-old could jump across, but which still reduces me to shivering weakness.